In 1989, NME writers James Brown and Sean O'Hagan took Nick Cave, The Fall's Mark E Smith, and The Pogues' Shane MacGowan to the Montague Arms in New Cross, south London, for a 'pop summit': the journalists were given £10 each by the magazine's editors to entertain the three musicians, which seemed terribly miserly, given that the three had well-deserved reputations as 'bon viveurs'.
What followed was a predictably lively and feisty conversation between three men who were far from shy about airing their opinions. “I have discussions like this all the time in pubs,” said Mark Smith at one point. “I end up beaten half to death on the floor.” In a new [paywalled] interview with The Irish Times, Nick Cave remembers the day being “an absolute fucking disaster” - “It was pure mayhem from the outset,” he once told The Guardian - but it did initiate lifelong friendships between the three iconic musicians.
“Shane had dropped an enormous amount of acid,” Cave recalls. “Mark E Smith was being very nasty and out of his mind on amphetamines. I was literally one day out of rehab, so it was a horrible situation, but I got to meet two of my heroes. To my mind, they were two of the greatest songwriters of our generation and I remained friends with both Shane and Mark.”
“Shane and I would collaborate very occasionally, but we were essentially friends,” Cave says. “We’d just go out and drink and take drugs and go to parties like friends do. We had a very real kind of relationship. In many ways, I don’t have those sorts of relationships because most of how I communicate with other people is through working with them. The very last thing me and Shane would do together is work.”
The two artists did in fact collaborate on a cover of What A Wonderful World in 1992, and shared a stage on more than one occasion. Cave was one of the artists who performed at MacGowan's funeral in Nenagh, County Tipperary after the singer's death on November 30 last year. His performance of The Pogues classic A Rainy Night In Soho subsequently went viral, and the singer remembers it as “an extremely moving experience.”
“Shane became more withdrawn from things in his final days,” Cave recalls. “It was very sad to see him go. I think Sinéad O’Connor described him as an angel. If angels exist, then Shane is one.”
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds will release their new album Wild God on August 30 via Bad Seed/PIAS.
- “There was no malice intended; it was just the sort of obnoxious thing I would say back then.” Nick Cave once famously dismissed Red Hot Chili Peppers' music as “garbage”, now he's working with Flea on a song with “arguably the greatest lyric ever”
- “There certainly was a fair amount of hard drinking. But there was a degree of professionalism, if hard to recognise at times”: How The Pogues made a folk-punk classic in Rum, Sodomy & The Lash
